Back in the tunnel, going up. Bright lights disappearing over the brim of my hat. Legs moving. I hardly felt my boots impacting against the stone.

  Blame post-fight jitters. Blame sleeplessness. Blame worry.

  Blame me.

  I should have put a tracking collar on the hatchling the moment I landed. He’d been asleep. Not like he could have objected.

  Apparently, Hao’s thoughts had gone in the same direction.

  “Couldn’t you have kept a hair to track that pet?” she said. “Or a scale, or whatever they have?”

  “Scale,” I said. “Wouldn’t work. Void wyrms have enough magic in them that it would douse anything even remotely magical.”

  My boots echoed against the stone. More dust here, more gravel. Still going up, branches rejoining the main tunnel.

  I wondered why Tell didn’t secure his com. Whether everyone was that lax around here. No one to hack their tech, maybe.

  “Couldn’t you use something else?” Hao said. “In the vids—” She stopped talking.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  “What vids?” I said, mostly to keep her engaged. “Don’t people secure their tech around here?”

  “Baylen does,” Hao said. “Most others don’t. The mage story vids.”

  “Mage vids are crud,” I said. “Does the crud security go both ways?”

  “Likely,” Hao said. “I’ve never checked. The transmission towers are encoded, but you can slip the protocols quite easily.”

  We walked in silence, even our footsteps muted now that there was fine-grained sand beneath our feet. The smell of ammonia was worse this far up, too.

  “Couldn’t you use the bed?” Hao said. “The one the pet sleeps on.”

  “Hatchling,” I corrected her distractedly, still thinking of the transmission towers. “And it doesn’t work that way. You need something that’s uniquely similar, like two parts of the same stick. The more dissimilar things are, the more false positives you get. Void wyrms are mainly magic. Dowsing for them is like dowsing for magic. It will show you every possible source of conjured power, including yourself. All noise, no signal.”

  I kicked a stone, which flew in a high arc in the low gravity and bounced against the wall with a sharp crack.

  The network kept logs. Hao had said that they used it to track people in a rockfall. The transmission towers were part of the network.

  Their range wasn’t very far below the ground. Anyone showing up in the tower logs would have been above ground.

  “What about the sheets?” Hao said. “They’d come from the same biopolymer source.”

  I stopped.

  “Cotton,” I said. “They’re cotton. Grown organics. An ex gave me a matching set from her home world.”

  Com logs and cotton sheets. I started running.

  “Where are you going?” Hao called after me.

  “To the transmission towers,” I called back. “I’ve got a thief to catch.”

  Behind me, her boots started pounding against the sand.